My wobbly legs would have embarrassed even a seasick sailor and my arms had all the strength of noodles. My eyes were filled with dirt and my sneakers drenched with water.

I showed up for a tour of duty as a groundskeeper assistant for the Staten Island Yankees and Jane Rogers, the team's president/general manager, handed me a blue team T-shirt and hustled me out on the field in time to help remove the gigantic 180-foot by 180-foot tarp from the infield.

"The job is not about mowing the lawn," Rogers said when I reported to work Friday night not expecting much more than watching a terrific fireworks display following the New York-Penn League game against the Hudson Valley Renegades. "It's about maintaining a safe and pristine playing field for the players. You need skills to be able to maintain that field.

It took 25 employees to pull off the orchestrated maneuverings of first-year head groundskeeper Bill Butler and his assistant, Luis Mejia of the Bronx, two hours prior to the first pitch.

I was included in that group, along with marketing folks, sales executives, and ticket reps. And with the 200-pound tarp rising and falling in 25 mile-per-hour Fourth of July winds in St. George and once nearly engulfing me, I thought of the ancient high-sea books Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island that I once enjoyed reading so much.

I was a sportswriter on a collision course with a shipwreck.

When I had survived the ordeal and caught my breath, I staggered over to Butler, a Boston native who has won five Baseball Field of the Year awards during 24 seasons in the business, as he worked feverishly smoothing the infield dirt near first base.

It didn't take long to catch the drift that Butler and Mejia are highly esteemed at the ballpark, as much for their work ethic as for their professional pride in the ballpark.

Butler's story, in particular, sounded much like the rags-to-riches tale of so many successful people. He was embarking on a career in computers when his company in Boston suddenly folded, so the 20-year-old headed to Florida in 1990 and saw a Help Wanted sign while attending a spring-training game at the Kansas City Royals' complex.

"I got a job in the warehouse unloading trucks and they gave me a vending job during games. I was hawking Pepsi in the stands, hustling all over the place, and at the end of spring training George Toma, probably the most famous groundskeeper in the world, and GM Herk Robinson grabbed me and said they liked the way I hustled.

"They asked me if I'd like to work on the grounds crew. I thought it was going to be temporary so I found a computer job, but I loved it and I worked my way up from being bottom man in the crew to an assistant. The following year when they came back to spring training, they pulled me off the Triple-A field and said they wanted me on the major-league field."

He landed his first head groundskeeper gig with the Spokane (Wash.) Indians, a team owned by Hall of Famer George Brett and his brothers. He worked in Kansas City as an assistant when the Royals switched to a natural grass field, and has since run the show at Double-A Bowie (Md.) and Trenton (N.J.), as well as successful stints at Single-A Lakewood (N.J.) and Myrtle Beach (S.C.) and a two-year stretch as Director of Field Operations for the Mets from 2004-05.

It's not unusual for Butler to arrive at work at 7 a.m. and not leave until 11 p.m.

He sounded regretful that a back injury forced him to miss the start of the current season –- the first time in his long career that he was placed on the disabled list and forced to the sidelines.

Butler said that the key to the maintenance of the breath-taking 7,171-seat St. George stadium is that the field is built on sand to allow for maximum drainage. He said the rains from earlier Friday would have threatened to postpone the Fourth of July game if not for the excellent drainage system.

Instead, the field was in perfect shape when the Yankees and Renegades took the field at 7 p.m.

I offered bit roles in hosing the infield and putting the baselines down, but my debut as a groundskeeper assistant didn't amount to much more than that. I must admit I was pleased to hear that other than dragging the infield in the bottom of the fourth inning, the crew normally doesn't have a lot to do during the game other than keep a sharp eye for any problems.

Imagine if there had been a rain delay and the tarp had to be rolled out again?